Dead in the Water: Murder and Fraud in the World's Most Secretive Industry

by Matthew Campbell

In August 1994 the Iron Antonis, an aging freighter owned by the family (and bearing the name of Iliopoulos’s eldest brother), departed the port of Tubarão, Brazil, with a load of iron ore. To operate commercially, merchant vessels require certificates from “classification societies,” private companies that inspect a ship’s condition and verify that its hull and machinery are in working order. The Iron Antonis’s certification, issued by the French provider Bureau Veritas, had been withdrawn earlier in the year. A Greek classification society, the Hellenic Register of Shipping, had stepped in to provide clearance, allowing it to sail from Brazil to Shekou, in southern China. Not long after it left Tubarão, the Iron Antonis encountered ferocious seas in the South Atlantic. The crew would have followed their training, sealing hatches and tying down gear, while their captain did all he could to keep the bow pointed into the waves—the best way to prevent them from capsizing the vessel. But the heavy seas kept coming, slamming with terrifying force onto the Iron Antonis’s deck. On September 3, the captain reported that its hull had cracked amid the swells. The vessel was listing badly, he said, and the twenty-four men on board might need to abandon ship. Later that day, the Iron Antonis stopped responding to hails. It sank in some of the loneliest waters on earth, about 1,700 nautical miles west of Cape Town. A small, empty lifeboat was all rescuers were able to find.

Despite his resistance to joining his father’s firm, Iliopoulos’s name was on the Iron Antonis’s paperwork, along with those of his two brothers. Greek prosecutors charged all three with the “negligent homicide” of the men on board, claiming they sent the freighter to sea knowing it was in dangerously poor condition. The brothers denied wrongdoing at their trial, which was held in 2000 and 2001 at a utilitarian courthouse near Panagiotis’s office in Piraeus.

Iliopoulos and his middle brother, Ioannis, were acquitted. But Antonis, who worked full-time for the patriarch, was found guilty and received a five-year suspended prison sentence. During his appeal, the judges heard testimony from a woman named Varvara Kiourani, the sister of the man who was second mate on the Iron Antonis. “The ship wasn’t sunk because of the weather conditions as we were initially told, but by those who held the fate of the crew in their hands,” she said. Kiourani recalled that in their last phone call, her brother “told me that the ship was a mess,” headed for the scrapyard after one more voyage. “We want justice to be served. These maritime crimes need to stop.”

By the late 2000s, Iliopoulos had augmented his passenger operations with a major presence in the oil trade. In 2008, a marine publication reported that he’d gone on a “buying spree,” picking up eight older tankers. One of them was the Elli, which would later come to grief off the Yemeni coast; another was the Brillante, which Iliopoulos acquired for $46 million, far more than his other purchases. He paid for it with a mortgage from Piraeus Bank, one of Greece’s largest lenders, which seemed to have provided Iliopoulos with much of his financing since he came into the industry. Iliopoulos’s assets weren’t assembled under a single corporate umbrella, making it difficult for Veale and Conner to determine their full extent.

The space was among the larger venues in the Rolls Building, one of the busiest dedicated commercial courthouses in the world. On any given day, the modern complex on the fringes of London’s legal district might host an indebted shopkeeper declaring bankruptcy, hedge funds fighting over the scraps of long-dead banks, and, in the biggest rooms on the top floors, Russian billionaires suing each other for possession of mining rights in Central Africa. Despite London’s status as an international legal hub, a place where judges are deemed reliable enough to settle the biggest of big-money disputes, some of the capital’s courthouses are a century old and infested with rats. The vast Royal Courts of Justice, for example, is sometimes used in movies for its Hogwarts-worthy spires, winding stone staircases, and halls lined with busts of ancient grandees.

Gaisman steered the cross-examination to the theft of the insurers’ emails that had exposed Gerry Lallis. The hacked files had mysteriously ended up in Iliopoulos’s hands. In fact, the lawyer who’d found the envelope containing printouts of the messages represented the same businessman who Iliopoulos claimed was refusing to return the WWGT archive. Wasn’t it true, Gaisman suggested, that the main beneficiary of the stolen emails, and the subsequent criminal complaint in Greece, was Iliopoulos himself? At first Iliopoulos was reluctant to engage with the question. “I will not play Mr. Gaisman’s game,” he protested. The barrister tried a more direct approach. “I’m putting it to you,” Gaisman said, staring at the witness, that it was “you who sponsored the illegal acquisition of these emails, Mr. Iliopoulos. Would you like to comment or not?” Iliopoulos answered in a steady voice: “If there is any responsibility for any of the assumptions in the allegations against me, you will be held responsible for those.” At this, Flaux erupted. “You will not use this court to threaten counsel or English lawyers. You will behave yourself!” he thundered. Iliopoulos tried to explain that he was talking about legal consequences, and that he was merely protecting his reputation, but the damage was done. “You have just, Mr. Iliopoulos, exposed your motive very clearly,” the judge said.

It was only as Iliopoulos passed the metal detectors that he noticed four police officers wearing stab vests waiting at the edge of the lobby. They were from the City of London Police. “Mr. Iliopoulos?” the tallest of them said. “I’m arresting you for conspiracy to commit fraud.” The shipowner looked surprised, but offered no resistance as they led him outside, toward an unmarked blue sedan. Veale and Conner, who suspected the arrest was coming, had been waiting on a street corner to get an unobstructed view. They watched in silence as Iliopoulos was guided into the backseat and driven away.

The police had planned the arrest carefully. As soon as Iliopoulos was in custody, a team swept his hotel room, looking for documents or electronic devices that might contain evidence about the Brillante. Detectives were waiting for him at a bunker-like police station in the City, where they asked him to empty his pockets. True to his courtroom testimony about avoiding technology, Iliopoulos wasn’t even carrying a phone. Officers also found nothing of substance at his hotel. It was as though he’d been expecting the room to be searched.

A few days later, Flaux oversaw another hearing in the Talbot case, in which the judge made his feelings about Iliopoulos clear. “He demonstrated himself an aggressive and arrogant man,” Flaux told the shipowner’s lawyers. “He was rude to everyone here, including me.” Iliopoulos’s barrister made a final plea for understanding. “Yes, he gets upset,” she said. “Yes, he takes the case very personally.” Iliopoulos felt the London insurance market was mounting a campaign against him, she went on. “He takes exception to the allegation that he had the ship deliberately set on fire.” Flaux was unpersuaded. In his written judgment, issued several weeks later, he delivered a scathing assessment of Iliopoulos’s testimony, describing him as “evasive and non-responsive and, on occasions, aggressive and threatening.” Overall, Flaux had formed a clear view that “he was not telling the truth.” He dismissed the convoluted explanation offered for the missing archive as a “fabricated story” and “a complete invention.” As for Iliopoulos’s promise to make sure the insurers and their agents were “held responsible” for any allegations against him, the judge was unequivocal: “With this intemperate and menacing evidence, Mr. Iliopoulos lost any remaining shred of credibility.” It was clear, Flaux wrote, that his real intention was to build up a case against the insurers in Greece,

“I’m afraid of the owner of the vessel,” Marquez said, “that they would kill me if I told the truth.” He spoke rapidly, in uneven but comprehensible English. “They said they would kill my family.” The reporter tried to get Marquez to slow down, asking who, exactly, he was referring to. “Do you mean Marios? Marios Iliopoulos?” “The Greek owner,” Marquez replied. “When I made a true statement, they said make it new.” The reporter again asked Marquez to clarify. “The man who threatened you, the owner, are you certain it was Marios Iliopoulos?” “One hundred percent sure it was Mario,”

Flaux’s decision to throw out Iliopoulos’s claim against his insurers left them in an odd position: having to prove fraud against someone who was no longer involved in the litigation. Technically, it was now a dispute between the Talbot syndicate and Piraeus Bank, which had loaned Iliopoulos the money to buy the Brillante, and claimed the Lloyd’s insurers were responsible for covering what it lost with the vessel’s destruction. Iliopoulos no longer had any obligation to answer questions or share evidence, nor provide explanations that could be picked apart in court. And the bank could justifiably claim to have no direct knowledge of what happened on board. Proving that an owner destroyed his own ship was hard enough; Zavos and his colleagues could count on one hand the number of times anyone had recently managed that in a London courtroom. Now they needed to do it against an opponent who didn’t even have to play the game.

Plakakis was in a restaurant, about a month after he arrived, when another Greek, a thickset man who walked with a noticeable limp, came over to say hello. He introduced himself as Vassilios Vergos, and, to Plakakis’s surprise, he was also in business with Ba’alawi and Nashwan, who were investors in the local branch of his salvage company, Poseidon. Plakakis was pleased by the coincidence. What were the odds, as he later put it, that there would be a pair of “Greek guys in the middle of nowhere”? Vergos lived on one of Poseidon’s boats, and Plakakis began visiting him frequently. Often, the salvor hosted him for Greek meals that he prepared in the tiny galley, simple affairs of grilled fish or stew that, for a man so far from home, felt like the height of luxury. Vergos was hopeless with technology, and in return for his hospitality, Plakakis began teaching him to send emails and make Skype calls, the two men sitting shoulder to shoulder as Vergos fumbled with the mouse. They also tried to push business each other’s way. When he spoke to ships’ captains and port agents about bunkering, Plakakis might mention that Poseidon was available for services like underwater cleaning. The company could also furnish security details, putting groups of armed Yemenis sourced by Nashwan onto a Poseidon tug called the Voukefalas—named, rather grandiosely, for the horse that Alexander the Great rode into battle—to escort passing ships. Plakakis soon learned that Vergos had an extreme emoti...

After a little over a month away, Vergos reappeared in Aden in the spring of 2011. On one of his first days back, he summoned Plakakis and Theodorou to a meeting. Plakakis could see the delight on his face; the salvor clearly had news that he couldn’t wait to share. Vergos explained that he’d been given a “job” by Iliopoulos. It was a grand plan; if it succeeded, he said, they’d all be rich. This time, however, a grounding like that of the Elli wouldn’t work. No one would believe that particular lightning could strike twice.

Vergos soon dropped any pretense of secrecy among the men he worked with. Early in the summer of 2011, he gathered Plakakis, Theodorou, and the older sailor Protogerakis, who’d returned from Greece after getting his leg patched up, around a table on the Vergina. Vergos was in an upbeat mood, eager to impress his colleagues with the scale of the plan he’d helped devise. It was evening, and Aden’s lights were blinking on across the water as he began to speak. The vessel they were waiting for was a supertanker, Vergos boasted, not some little ship. It would be attacked by supposed pirates, who would round up everyone on board apart from the captain and chief engineer. The chief engineer would then show the intruders where to detonate a grenade in the engine room, ensuring that the ship was badly damaged, if not effectively destroyed. For weeks, Vergos had been reminding Protogerakis to make sure he had a Lloyd’s Open Form, the standard contract for salvaging a vessel, close at hand. Poseidon would handle the recovery, positioning it for a generous award from the Lloyd’s market.

Vergos told Plakakis and the others that he’d found a solution. The “pirates,” he said, would be men from the Yemeni Coast Guard, sourced by Nashwan. Plakakis had learned enough about Yemen not to be shocked by the idea of employing agents of the state for a bit of unconventional freelance work. Set up in the aftermath of 9/11, as President Saleh attempted to ingratiate himself with the US, the YCG was supposed to be a government showpiece, a capable counterterrorism force that would secure a nearly two-thousand-kilometer coastline. Eager to build the service’s capacity, the US government had provided it with more than a dozen patrol boats, and American naval experts trained its sailors. It received about $30 million of Pentagon funding in 2009 alone.

Shortly after Plakakis arrived, a fishing trawler pulled up alongside the Brillante, mooring next to one of Poseidon’s boats. Dusk was approaching as one of its passengers, a broad-shouldered British man with a bald, sun-worn head, clambered off. Thanks to his years in London, Plakakis spoke better English than the other Greeks, and he helped David Mockett get oriented. Mockett’s survey wouldn’t begin until morning, and Plakakis showed him to the bed on the Vergina where he would spend the night. Though he was still new to the world of salvage, Plakakis understood Mockett’s role: to evaluate the condition of the ship and send a report back to Lloyd’s, where its insurers would decide whether to pay out. Before everyone turned in, Plakakis joined Vergos and Mockett for dinner. Around the table, the men got to talking about their families, and how they came to be in such a remote part of the Middle East. Both Vergos and Mockett had grown daughters in their home countries, and the surveyor mentioned that he had a crop of grandchildren, whose exploits delighted him when he was in England. That prompted Vergos to turn to Mockett with some unsolicited counsel. “At your age,” he said, “it’s better to stay with your grandchildren.” Why run around a dangerous place like Yemen? Vergos repeated the advice: “You can go back to your country and enjoy your grandchildren.”

Toward noon the next day, Mockett descended from the Brillante to the floating crane, his survey complete. To Plakakis, it was obvious that he was perplexed by what he’d found—or, perhaps, not found. In earshot of many of the salvors on board, Mockett remarked that he’d seen no evidence of a strike by a rocket-propelled grenade, or of pirates firing their weapons on the tanker—both key elements of what had reportedly occurred. “Everyone could see on his face that he was not happy about what he had seen or what he had been told,” Plakakis recalled later.

It had started late the previous night. Plakakis was visiting his mother in rural Greece, along with his wife and their three-year-old son. Around midnight, the house phone rang. A woman was on the line, announcing that she wanted to speak to Plakakis, who was outside. Call back in ten minutes, his wife said. When she told him about the call, Plakakis was wary. Hardly anyone knew where he was staying, and he’d made a point of not giving out his mother’s number. The phone rang again. This time, Plakakis listened in silently on another handset as his wife answered. “I’m Mr. Iliopoulos’s secretary,” the woman said. The shipowner wanted to speak to him. Plakakis’s wife said he wasn’t in, apologized, and hung up.

The next morning, Plakakis heard car engines outside. He looked through a window to see a pickup truck and a gray sedan idling a little way up the road. Inside were a group of bulky-looking men. Peering more closely while trying to remain hidden, he was sure he could see the stocky figure of Vassilios Vergos, his former business partner from Yemen. (Vergos denies that he was present.) As Plakakis watched, the house phone rang. Plakakis ignored it, his heart pounding. It rang again, and then again. A horrifying thought occurred to him. The men were listening from the street, trying to work out which address the phone number connected to. They were trying to find him.

Conner called Veale and quickly agreed on a plan. They would use the same armed security team that had protected Gerry Lallis, the Piraeus lawyer, two years earlier. Conner got his man on the phone and issued his orders. “Get there as soon as you can,” he said. “When you arrive, use the codeword Zulu to identify yourselves, then wait for further instructions.” The Greek outfit were serious operatives. Armed and highly trained, they wore sunglasses and jeans and zoomed around the country in blacked-out cars like a private SWAT team, guarding politicians and businessmen. Conner knew the group leader as “George.” They left Athens as quickly as possible, beginning the two-hour drive to Plakakis’s mother’s village.

“No, sir,” Gonzaga said. Masks wouldn’t alarm him. They might be worn “because sometimes it’s dust,” or to protect against disease—an explanation that, well before the emergence of COVID-19, would have struck few in the courtroom as credible. Gaisman was trying to show that Gonzaga had ignored every conceivable antipiracy procedure on the night in question, defying his documented training as well as common sense. As the lawyer continued to push him to explain his behavior, Gonzaga’s answers became even more strained. “So if somebody tells you that there’s a small, unlit boat approaching,” Gaisman asked, “it doesn’t cross your mind that they might be pirates?” Not necessarily, Gonzaga explained. “Because sometimes there’s a small boat coming [to] sell fish.” Nocturnal fishmongering—in one of the most dangerous waterways in the world, no less—was a new one, and Gaisman seemed genuinely startled by the claim. “Selling fish in the middle of the night?” he asked. “Yeah, it’s in my previous experience, sir.” “It would be a rather high-risk area just to sell a few kingfish or John Dory, wouldn’t it?”

Repeating what he’d previously told investigators, Gonzaga testified that the apparent pirates had ordered him to sail to Somalia—although not, curiously, toward any specific point in that country, which has more than three thousand kilometers of coastline. With that statement on the record, Gaisman sprang his trap. The ship’s navigational logs, he reminded the court, showed that Gonzaga had in fact steered it southwest, toward Djibouti—a placid East African state, fortified with US and French military installations, where it would be distinctly unwise to turn up with a hijacked oil tanker. As Gaisman pointed out, real pirates—experienced seamen, with deep knowledge of oceanic navigation—“would be likely to notice if the vessel was being steered in the wrong direction, wouldn’t they?” After all, Gonzaga had helpfully confirmed, in his earlier testimony, that there were multiple instruments on the bridge showing the Brillante’s heading. The only explanation, Gaisman said, was that no one had any intention of taking the Brillante to Somalia, and the ship’s captain knew it.

In his police statement, Plakakis had said he’d known the Brillante operation would be dangerous: he feared that the oil on board could explode, or cause a spill on the Yemeni coast. If that was true, MacDonald Eggers asked, “Why didn’t you warn someone about these dangers before it happened?” Again, Plakakis asked the lawyer to consider his circumstances. “I have to remind you I was in the middle of the sea. It wasn’t in a flat here in Kensington to call by police station.” “But you had all means of communication available. You could have communicated with anyone, including the insurers, or the police.” Plakakis had remained patient through most of the questioning, but now he began to get angry. “Forgive me for being rude,” he told MacDonald Eggers. “Mr. David Mockett, he knew how to communicate and he’s where he is.” He continued: “Don’t ask me questions why I didn’t do what I didn’t do . . . whatever I did was correct because I’m still alive today. That’s all I know.” Neither MacDonald Eggers nor Teare said anything in reply. On a flimsy chair at the rear of the courtroom, Cynthia Mockett was sitting quietly.

“The armed men who boarded Brillante Virtuoso,” Teare wrote, “had no intention of hijacking the vessel for ransom and only pretended to be pirates.” He’d concluded that Captain Gonzaga and Nestor Tabares, the chief engineer, “assisted the armed men in their task,” serving as key players in a conspiracy to which “Mr. Vergos of Poseidon was party.” The next lines were the ones the detectives found most satisfying to read. “I do not consider that there is a plausible explanation of the events which befell Brillante Virtuoso which is consistent with an innocent explanation,” Teare said. And he had no doubt about who was responsible: “The orchestrator of these events was the owner of Brillante Virtuoso, Mr. Iliopoulos.” For the lawyers and Talbot’s Paul Cunningham, the verdict was met with intense relief.

Just two months after Judge Teare ruled that Iliopoulos had orchestrated one of history’s most audacious maritime frauds, a Seajets ferry won “Ship of the Year” at the Lloyd’s List Greek Shipping Awards. Iliopoulos accepted the prize with a speech at a glitzy ceremony in Athens. Some of the most respected names in the industry were in attendance, alongside a clutch of Greek politicians that included the country’s deputy minister for sport and culture. Wearing a black suit and crisp white shirt, Iliopoulos praised the vessel’s record-breaking speed and environmentally friendly turbine engines. “At Seajets, our goals are fully aligned with the goals of all Greeks who want to see Greece, this country with its huge history and culture, smile again and fill the hearts of all Greeks with pride and joy,” he beamed. “We believe that society cannot exist without respecting, living, breathing together.” Iliopoulos had also won plaudits for his response to the wildfires that tore through the Greek mainland in 2018, killing more than a hundred people and displacing thousands. He’d hired cranes to clear the roads, donated food supplies, and organized special events to provide “psychological support to children affected by the tragedy,” according to a press release issued on his behalf.

When COVID-19 brought global trade and tourism to a halt in 2020, many maritime businesses faced ruin. Iliopoulos, with typical bravado, saw an opportunity. He bought at least six passenger vessels, at fire-sale prices, from desperate cruise operators whose businesses had shut down. Within a few months he’d sold two for scrap, earning three times the $9 million he paid, according to estimates by trade publications. Like the Brillante before them, the Columbus and the Magellan were dismantled by hand and stripped of recyclable material at Indian and Pakistani shipbreaking yards, some of the world’s most dangerous and polluted workplaces. Because of the human and environmental cost, it’s illegal for European companies to send vessels to either country to be broken down without first removing all potentially hazardous waste, but the rules are easily skirted by transferring ownership offshore. The other four liners that Iliopoulos bought during the pandemic were, at the time of writing, laid up in Greek ports awaiting their fate. Given his talent for turning old ships into money, they should earn him a healthy return.

The newest threat to the occupants of One Lime Street was the novel coronavirus, which was expected to cost Lloyd’s members at least 6 billion pounds as companies claimed on policies covering unexpected business interruption. Globally, the insurance industry responded with increasingly creative ways to avoid having to compensate clients. Early in the pandemic, an American law firm asserted that since the virus was microscopic and could only survive temporarily outside the human body, the damage it caused wasn’t physically quantifiable. Insurers seized on the defense enthusiastically. The first of hundreds of lawsuits to decide the issue began in December 2020, when a New Orleans restaurant sued in Louisiana District Court for the money lost when it was forced to close. The defendants were listed as “Certain Underwriters at Lloyd’s, London.” The industry’s pugnacious attitude toward that and similar claims offered a sharp contrast to its historic ambivalence about scuttling. In the UK, Lloyd’s members took a test case on COVID-19 payouts all the way to the Supreme Court, and lost. The pandemic caused one of the worst years in living memory for London’s insurers. Lloyd’s had to close its historic Underwriting Room twice in 2020, forcing underwriters and brokers who’d spent a lifetime making deals face-to-face into unfamiliar digital interactions. It was awkward but it worked, just well enough. The market kept on going, even as the Lloyd’s corporation, which operates it, swun...